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the entire enterprise of modal logic seems facepalm worthy to me
I understand that when folks say "modal logic" in this context, they're generally referring to model logics that implicitly quantify over poorly-defined spaces. However, that's not what all modal logics are like, and so I hate to see them maligned with a broad brush.
Consider, say, dynamic logic), which I actually use as a tool in my research on program analysis. When my set of "actions" are statements in a well-defined programming language, I can mechanically translate any dynamic logic statement into a non-modal, first-order statement....